What if you could track tweet data using a URL, twitter name, phrase or hashtag to predict Twitter trends affecting your brand, your candidate or yourself? Well, it’s only a click away at TweetReach.

After entering your search query, TweetReach analyzes tweets that match your search and then reports the reach and exposure data for those tweets. We’ll show you some samples of what this means in a bit.

The folks at TweetReach thought it would be interesting to see if tweet data could be used to predict elections.

Right before the Super Tuesday primaries in March, we launched the TweetReach Republican Primary Tracker which looked at the relationship between what people say on Twitter and what they do at the polls. . . . The visualizer confirmed that despite a candidate’s tweet volume, reach, and exposure on Twitter, these data were not a good predictor of election results. They are, however, a great way to understand how popular dialogue about a candidate translates into Twitter conversation.

We asked Jenn Deering Davis, Co-Founder of TweetReach what this means for how folks could use the tool and she told us, “When viewed day-by-day, these figures don’t reflect much beyond which candidates are being discussed more in the news. They don’t really tell us anything about who’s doing better in the larger polls or who might eventually win the election. But over time, patterns do emerge from the Twitter data.”

And speaking to this election study in particular, she told us that, “It became quite evident over the past month that Romney was really the only viable candidate; his reach on Twitter has been steadily increasing, giving him a much larger potential audience when compared to the other candidates. He’s also garnered more tweets from more unique contributors over the course of the year, and his Twitter buzz has accelerated in the past month as the others have seen declines.” Verrrry interesting.

We told you about the Washington Post’s @mentionmachine a little while back, but this obviously goes beyond that. TweetReach tracks conversations so you not only get a sense of who is most popular, but what specific tweets or sentiments around that person or topic are the most popular. THAT can be powerful.

And to put this into an every day user perspective, I used it to calculate my own tweet reach and the results were both instructive and encouraging. Nothing like an added oomph when you see that your efforts are paying off! And it’s also valuable to see if your efforts aren’t paying off! But back to my results – I’ve taken a screenshot and you can see the larger version by clicking the image. As you can see, the report will tells you how many accounts you’ve reached and the exposure your tweets have received (impressions), as well as who your top retweeters are which tweets have been retweeted the most often – so you know who to thank